Holiday Snaps?

As you may or may not know my second book is a Travelogue, and I have to say if you haven’t heard that I’m writing a Travelogue then my PR people are for the chop – but I digress – sorry.

Back to the point of this little blogette for a moment, as you may or may not know my second book is a Travelogue and it’s going to be a wonderful bestseller as usual and of course will be available in all good bookshop (and some not quite as good probably) and Amazon.com in paper and electronic form.

When researching my marvellous ‘must read’ of a Travelogue I travelled the world visiting interesting places, dreadful places and really disgusting places like oh of the top of my head err India!

As you may or may not know India is a rapidly developing country, it’s rapidly developing into something awful like, um Pakistan! It’s a land of corruption, desperate inequality, squalor, child labour and according to the BBC a ever growing practice of female focticide or to be more abrupt, the killing of baby girls.

The most recent census conducted in 2011 shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven in India – activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade because Indian families only want male children.

Sadly this sort of disgusting activity seems to be prevalent in what are known as ‘developing’ countries, China manages to stay well ahead of India in the baby girl killing states but then they have had more practice.

Indians only really started killing their baby daughters in large numbers in the sixties when dowries were outlawed by the government. Before then a daughter was the family’s prized possession because she would fetch a good price on the open marriage market but these days sadly she won’t.

So one disgusting practice was replaced by another but the one thing you learn when you are travelling ‘developing’ countries that have large populations is that life is cheap and if you are a defenceless child your life is more than cheap it’s worthless.

Here are a couple of my holiday snaps from one of the places I visited in India, the 10 year old lad in the picture above gave up school aged 6 so that he could work in the coal mines and earn a wage. Today working conditions are “good for him” he said, a few years ago he was digging coal out of the earth with his bare hands now he is just bagging it above ground.

My second picture shows how the coal mine employes only the most rigorous safety standards, the walkway is made from ‘real wood’ and hasn’t collapsed in weeks.

As you can see from my holiday snaps travelling the world broadens your mind mainly because you have to cram in more horrors.

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2 thoughts on “Holiday Snaps?”

I am one of the lucky ones. I was born in the Pacific Northwest, USA. If I had been born in my Dad’s village
and just happened to be the first born, I may have ended up down a well!
Such a beautiful soulful country and yet so terribly backward and superstitious.
A country run by men will never address the needs of its female population.

First thank you for reading my little blog, I only just remember reading this one, but I like children and when I saw the way they were treated I was appalled.

You are so right, especially about the all male culture. Sadly (and usually if you see what I mean) when someone like me who wants to highlight the injustices of what is as you say a very beautiful country, who comes from lets cal it an “aid donor country” we just get labelled as racist!

You have to hope that one day the mentality of the people change and the terrible things that happen will be a thing of the passed, but if you see what is going in the Midlands of England at the moment where a section of the immigrant community are now praying on very young white girls and committing awful injustices, just because they think that white girls, for reasons best known to themselves are not as morally pure as their own children, you wonder if even in a modern society some individuals ever change their ways.

I am so glad that you were born on the Pacific Northwest, USA. No western country is perfect, but when you compare how they look after their children to other countries you can see as you said definite benefits from being born in a civilised country.

Lastly before I get down of my soapbox. I have always thought it odd to use words like, “emerging,” “undeveloped” and so on when describing countries like India and China, to pick just two examples, they both have very old societies, and were very highly developed way before where you and I were born was even mapped, so what is really the issue with these countries, is it religion, culture beats me as they say!